The President of the Joint Teachers’ Service Union, Vass Gunawardena, states that the government has introduced a new learning system to gradually discontinue the provision of free school textbooks.
He points out that 42 QR codes have been included in the Sinhala curriculum module alone for the first semester of the first year in 2026. Due to this, he emphasizes that a huge burden will be placed on parents to print the necessary lesson parts for their children. He says that this new system will cause great inconvenience and additional expense to parents.
Commenting further, he warns that the private sector, which understands this situation, will soon print textbooks related to those modules and present them to the market.
As a result, he also points out that there is a risk that parents will have to pay for school textbooks that they have received free of charge for many years. He further said that he will intervene together with other mass organizations in the country to defeat this new education policy.